Producción de la entonación española en enunciados de habla espontánea: el caso de los estudiantes taiwaneses

Abstract

The aim of this experiment is to study the specific difficulties that Chinese students of Spanish encounter in the production of Spanish intonation. Out of 120 recorded dialogues in spontaneous speech, we select 12 declarative utterances, 12 exclamatory utterances, and 12 interrogative utterances, corresponding to 25 native speakers of Chinese learning Spanish (different levels) at Providence University in Taiwan. Then, we ask 60 native speakers of Spanish and Catalan to listen to each utterance, so as to judge whether the type of intonation they perceive corresponds to the type the student intends to produce on the recording. The results would seem to suggest that the type of formal instruction the subjects receive does not have any significant effect on their intonation competence in the production of spontaneous speech.  The main difficulty lies in the production of exclamatory intonation; the second difficulty lies in the production of interrogative intonation; the production of declarative intonation causes the least difficulty.